Cancer cells are devious monsters that kill people by sabotaging normal cell functions toward a path of uncontrolled cell growth. Without an effective treatment, aggressive cancers can crowd out healthy tissue and ultimately cause organ failure and death. This devastation by design makes it seem as though a cancer cell has a mind of its … Continue reading Outsmarting cancer’s deadly tricks
Author: Todd Dubnicoff
You Call It Corn Stem Cells, We Call It An A-Maize-Ing Hope to Feed the World
Here at the Stem Cellar, we’re laser-beam focused on the exciting progress being made to bring stem cell-based treatments to patients with unmet medical needs. But what good will those life-saving treatments be if the patients end up starving from hunger? It’s a serious question to ask considering the world’s diminishing farmlands and yet another … Continue reading You Call It Corn Stem Cells, We Call It An A-Maize-Ing Hope to Feed the World
How To Be a CIRM Stem Cell Champion
Patients suffering from incurable diseases don’t have the luxury of being patient. Their lives depend on the speedy development of new therapies. That’s why our mission at CIRM is to accelerate stem cell treatments to patients with unmet medical needs. Through CIRM funding of top-notch stem cell research – some of which is already in … Continue reading How To Be a CIRM Stem Cell Champion
Learning about the Potential of Stem Cells? There’s an App for that.
Staying informed about stem cell research is an important but daunting task. With all of the scientific lingo, the hundreds of websites, and the multitude of diseases related to stem cell research, it's a perfect storm of information overload. For our readers who feel swept up in those waves at times (or most of the … Continue reading Learning about the Potential of Stem Cells? There’s an App for that.
Achilles’ Heel of Brain Cancer Identified in Tumor Stem Cells
Few words strike me with more dread than glioblastoma, the name for a very aggressive, incurable cancer of the brain. Although surgery and chemotherapy can help hold off or reverse a glioblastoma’s growth for a while, almost inevitably the tumor comes back along with a terrible prognosis: an average survival time of 12 to 15 … Continue reading Achilles’ Heel of Brain Cancer Identified in Tumor Stem Cells
Easier, Cheaper Stem Cell-Based Heart Muscle Sets Stage for Large-Scale Drug Development
The great inventions – like the automobile, the Internet or aviation – are marked as important turning points in human history. But it’s usually the additional tinkering that goes on in the ensuing years after the initial invention that makes the technology feasible in terms of cost, reproducibility and mass production. The same holds true … Continue reading Easier, Cheaper Stem Cell-Based Heart Muscle Sets Stage for Large-Scale Drug Development
Chemo-Induced Heart Failure: Using Stem Cells to Identify Those at Risk
The good news is you’re cancer free, the bad news is you need a heart transplant. It almost sounds like the punchline to a joke, but it’s no laugher matter because the scenario is real for some cancer patients. Chemotherapy is a life saver for many but certain doses can be so toxic that it’s often hard … Continue reading Chemo-Induced Heart Failure: Using Stem Cells to Identify Those at Risk
Diabetes’ demise? Master Switch Identified for Turning Stem Cells into Functional Insulin-Producing Cells
It’s been a good week for diabetes researchers and the over one million Americans with type 1 diabetes who are hoping for an eventual stem cell-based treatment for this incurable disease. Published a day apart, two studies reported on achieving an elusive goal for the field: creating functional insulin-producing cells in a lab dish from induced … Continue reading Diabetes’ demise? Master Switch Identified for Turning Stem Cells into Functional Insulin-Producing Cells
Stem cells provide promising skin in the game for treating burn victims
For severe burn victims and others in need of skin transplants, current treatments using artificial skin grafts made from sheets of lab-grown skin cells aren’t ideal because they lack the complex structures needed to fully restore many of the skin’s critical functions. For example, artificial skin doesn’t contain oil-producing sebaceous glands and forces burn victims … Continue reading Stem cells provide promising skin in the game for treating burn victims
Embryos with abnormal chromosomes can repair themselves
Like an increasing number of women, Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz waited later in life to have kids and was pregnant at 44 with her second child. Because older moms have an increased risk of giving birth to children with genetic disorders, Zernicka-Goetz opted to have an early genetic screening test about 12 weeks into her pregnancy. The … Continue reading Embryos with abnormal chromosomes can repair themselves
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